This North Needs Reform (3)
Fortunately, no emergency ever came our way.
We reached Asbil Village without incident. The fighting there had only just ended, and postwar reconstruction was in full swing.
And yet… something about the scene felt off.
"Hey! We're short on timber!"
"Hold on! I'm almost there!"
…What the hell am I looking at?
Why were people hauling around logs that ought to have been handled by combat-engineer equipment?
"Drive it in here."
"Heave!"
Asbil Village was ringed by wooden palisades on every side, a defense against wild beasts and monster raids. Part of that wall had been wrecked in the latest attack, and the territory's soldiers were "repairing" it by hoisting massive trees with their bare hands and slamming them into the ground.
And not even processed lumber—raw, untrimmed green timber.
"Hold it steady."
"Quit fretting and get started!"
Side branches?
To the iron-blooded men of the North, that sort of thing was no obstacle at all. One soldier would clamp down on the base of the trunk while another took a gigantic battle-axe to the limbs.
Not sawing. Cleaving—like a kitchen cleaver coming down.
"…Is that, ah, actually all right?"
"What do you mean, Young Master? Ah—if you're worried about using green wood without drying it first, you need not be. The North stays below freezing year-round, so moisture spoilage is hardly a concern. Though, to be honest, the walls tend to get smashed by monsters long before they'd have a chance to rot. Hahaha."
Yeah, that's part of it, but…
Wrong approach. Conventional thinking meant nothing to these people.
I had prided myself on seeing every variety of insanity the frontline units could throw at me. This place, though, was a league of genuine freaks that made modern madmen look like mild-mannered office workers.
Logs that needed a five-ton hydraulic crane were being lifted by hand, and the work a roller should have been packing down was being handled the same way.
Okay. Analysis complete.
I couldn't win.
I finally understood how foolish it was to hold northerners to a modern man's standards.
But I would not be shocked again. A competent field officer measures the range and limits of whatever lunatic happens to be in his unit and builds his predictions around them.
I've got the measure of you now, northerners. Your level is…
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Bwahahaha! Everyone, eat your fill and get back to work!"
"Ooooooh!"
"Young Master! Is it mountain bear today?!"
"…?"
What the fuck is that.
A bear the size of a house was being carried toward us on a man's shoulders. It was so enormous that the man underneath was half hidden by its bulk.
The problem was, the man underneath was already a head-and-a-half taller than any ordinary adult male—Darius Wintershield. My older brother.
If it had been anyone else, the bear would have looked like it was floating along upside-down all by itself.
"Heave!"
Darius flung the bear to the ground. A thunderous boom rolled out as if an earthquake had struck, and the earth itself shuddered. That was with a deep cushion of snow to absorb the impact.
"Cut it up, fill your bellies, and put the rest in the village storehouse. We may not have gone hungry, but the villagers couldn't hunt a damn thing while those White Goblins were around. Ah—leave the core. That's for Logwell."
This… was the eldest son of the Grand Duke's house?
I had already read Logwell's memories and known as much in theory, but the Wintershield Grand Duchy really did sit a long way from what I thought of as a "normal noble house."
Then—
"Hm? Logwell?"
Darius, mid-stretch, locked eyes with me.
"Brother."
"What are you doing here?!"
I bowed my head, and his bellow of pure shock hit me like a trumpet blast. A moment later a gust of wind slammed into me—Darius, who had been standing over there a second ago, was suddenly right in front of my face.
"Are you all right?! No—never mind that. Wait here. I'll tear that core out right now and—"
"Wait, wait! I'm fine, Brother!"
I threw both hands up in a panic to stop him.
Anyone else might have wondered why I was making a fuss over free bear gall—something most people couldn't afford if they tried—but—
The "elixirs" in this world are not something you just casually swallow.
Maybe it was because mana was real here. Back on the peninsula, a tonic at worst left you warm and a little feverish. Here, if you took an elixir carelessly, heat would boil through your whole body and put you out of commission for several turns.
In the original Logwell's memories, he had once taken one wrong and spent several nights groaning in bed. How low did your capacity have to be for that to happen? And yet he had kept choking them down and collapsing over and over—clear proof that the body's original owner, unable to refuse anything his brother brought him, had just swallowed whatever he was given.
And this meatheaded brother of mine never even realized and kept feeding them to him with a smile…
I soothed Darius, who looked ready to put on a live gallbladder-extraction show right then and there.
"I am truly healthy right now. The fact that I made it all the way here should tell you that."
"You're the type who always overdoes it. And then that frail body of yours just keels over."
"That's only by your standards, Brother… No, that isn't the point. I came here on official business."
"Official business?"
A question mark practically floated over Darius's head.
Fair enough. Unlike him—formally invested as the eldest young master—I had never been given any particular office by this body's father, the Northern Grand Duke.
But who was I?
An ace officer running the basic twenty-first-century military mindset: if there's no work, invent some.
"Inspecting the surrounding villages and resolving their scattered problems is only natural duty for a son of House Wintershield. I have come in person to fulfill that sacred obligation."
I put my silver tongue to work—the same one that had once melted a three-star octopus of a general. Compared to dealing with that particular monster, this was almost insultingly easy.
"Hmm… Then and now, you always talk in such hard words. Well, fine. Look around if you've got business. This brother of yours still has work left to do."
Unlike a certain nightmarish three-star octopus with thousands of tentacles stretched across every unit in the army, the eldest son of the Northern Grand Duke got dizzy the moment a sentence ran past three lines.
Classic field type. Thanks to that, I was free to walk the village without any further persuasion.
In that case—
Time to get started.
In the North, House Wintershield commanded absolute standing among the northern people.
That was because the North itself, while technically part of the Empire, was treated almost like a separate country. Digging into the history behind that would take us all the way back through northern lore, so I'll skip it.
What matters is how awkward my position is as the second son of that house.
House Wintershield's absolute prestige in the North came down to one thing: the Grand Duke's house was responsible for the North's stability.
Monsters invading? The Grand Duke's house rode out.
Wild beasts running rampant? The Grand Duke's house rode out.
Famine striking a village and starvation spreading? The Grand Duke's house rode out.
Is this a grand duchy or a glorified neighborhood watch?
They called themselves the grand dukes who ruled the North, but in practice they were a nationwide errand service for every northerner alive. With the house guaranteeing both their livelihoods and their safety, the people of the North had no choice but to offer absolute loyalty.
Which left my own position… awkward.
Generation after generation, House Wintershield has protected the people of the North. They could do it because every Northern Grand Duke in the line carried combat power on Darius's level. I don't.
Logwell Wintershield was a thorough irregular in the bloodline. His mother hadn't even been a northerner—she was from elsewhere—and while that had never earned him open discrimination, it also meant he had never received the kind of respect the ancestors of the line had always enjoyed. That was the problem.
Which makes the present situation even more delicate.
Think about it. I had come to Asbil Village to fix the systemic defects scattered through it. Except the place was currently buried in disaster recovery.
Even if I solved their chronic problems for them, how well would it go over if some stranger showed up and asked permission to turn their village upside down so he could fix everything in one go—when they had lived that way their whole lives?
I'd be lucky if I didn't get a full verbal thrashing for being some brat playing games while the adults were working.
By that measure, the situation was a dead end.
But what kind of place was the twenty-first-century military?
Just because there's no answer, you don't work?
When they say dig, you dig. Even if you hate it, even if the ground is solid concrete, the first shovel still has to go in if you want the problem solved. And for that, you use every means and method available.
"You wish to see our village's ledgers, Young Master?"
"Yes. That is correct."
I marched straight into the village chief's house without hesitation.
True to form as a northerner, the chief still boasted a towering frame even with a body past sixty. If Huang Zhong from the Three Kingdoms had come back to life, he might have looked something like this. Even in this bitter cold he was sweating freely, hard at work on the reconstruction.
"Hrm…"
He looked thoroughly flustered, glancing back and forth between me and Old Max standing at attention behind me.
Out of my line of sight, a silent WWE match was almost certainly underway—What the hell is this? on one side, and I have no idea either. Just let him do what he wants on the other. Sure enough, a short while later the chief nodded, still looking deeply uncomfortable.
"The ledgers are on this shelf, but… the lads under me are utter simpletons when it comes to this sort of thing, so there may be issues…"
"Ah, that is perfectly fine. There is little about northern circumstances I would not already understand."
Ledgers meant the records of Asbil Village's sales, purchases, and the profits deducted from them—in other words, the most sensitive issue of the age: taxes. I made a point of showing right away that I was not here to dig into that.
As if I wanted to stand here and lecture them about unpaid taxes.
"Ah… is that so?"
Once I made that clear, the chief's face eased—only to grow oddly puzzled instead. A silent Then what did you come all this way for? hung in the air. But there was nothing to gain from pressing further, and he still had plenty of work outside. He left with a brief apology for not being able to stay, and headed straight back to the reconstruction site.
Good. My turn, then?
I pulled every ledger off the shelf in one sweep and dumped them onto the table. The old wooden surface groaned in protest; I ignored it and started from the most recent entries.
Old Max behind me asked if I needed any help. I waved him off. This was the kind of work you had to check yourself, line by line.
Asbil Village. Just as the original owner's memories said—a place that lives by the hunt.
In a North that was white snow country in every direction, living off farming was next to impossible. There were crops you could grow in the brief summer when the permafrost thawed, but that was never enough to carry a full year. They farmed when they could, of course—but the real living came from selling what they hunted to merchants.
And yet, as I went through the ledgers, one strange point jumped out.
"Outgoings higher than income…"
Even when they made money, more of it was flowing out than coming in?
It could happen. For farmers, a bad harvest would force exactly that. But this was a village that lived entirely by hunting. Unless the game had been hunted to extinction or they simply couldn't go out, there was no reason hunting should fail—
And there's no way that's the case. Game walks right up to the doorstep every day.
If there had been heavy casualties and medical costs had ballooned, I could have accepted that. But no matter how I looked at these books, the problem was a pure gap between revenue and expenditure.
There was only one reason that could happen.
"Someone's playing games with the numbers."
That was my conclusion.